Bipartisan weather emerges in the Northern Rockieshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/bipartisan-weather-emerges-in-the-northern-rockies
Blustery winds that tear at your exposed skin and clothing day after day, keeping you on edge. Outbursts of bone-rattling thunder and lightning strikes on top of you, followed by pounding rain and barrages of hailstones that force everyone to scurry for cover. Mud galore. But occasionally, through magical openings in the clouds, sunlight beams down and bestows a heart-warming glow on everything.

That's the kind of weather we've had in Montana this spring. It’s not all that different from the kind of politics we’ve been having, too. I hope this political trend can be a model for the whole nation.

No matter where you are, a good model is needed right now. Who doesn't lament the bad weather in our governance, whether we're talking Congress or state and local governments? Like a thunderstorm, most political arguments contain no hint of compromise, no respect for the opposing point of view. Ignorance -- of science and economics and other realities -- is frequently celebrated. The stormy posturing generates new crises without solving older ones and makes actual progress nearly impossible.

In Montana, the main parties, Democrats and Republicans, have traded control of the state government back-and-forth for decades -- much like what we've seen in Washington, D.C. Montana Democrats have held the governorship since 2005, while arch-conservative, Tea-Partyish Republicans have gained ground in the Legislature. Going into this year's legislative session, it looked like the arch-conservatives would rule. They had challenged moderate Republican legislators in the primaries, defeating some and intimidating others. Their party had an overwhelming advantage, 59-41 in the Montana House of Representatives and 29-21 in the Montana Senate. And yet by the time the Montana Legislature wrapped up its session at the end of April, there were some big accomplishments.

In each chamber, about a dozen moderate Republicans broke ranks and teamed up with the Democrats to pass an expansion of Medicaid. This allows a ton of federal funding -- $5 billion over eight years -- into Montana, and when combined with a bit of state funding it will provide more affordable health care for tens of thousands of needy Montanans.

The same bipartisan allies in Montana also passed a measure that requires better disclosure of the financing for political ads. They also greatly increased funding of services for the mentally ill, and they rejected an extreme gun-rights measure, which would've overruled Montana college administrators and allowed people to carry concealed guns on state campuses.

The arch-conservatives, by their loudness alone, seemed to be the majority in the Legislature, and they opposed all of those measures with the usual over-the-top rhetoric. They got so ticked off by their repeated defeats that toward the end they shot themselves in the foot, so to speak, by rejecting a widely popular attempt to devote $150 million to repairing Montana's essential infrastructure. Many business leaders want to see improvements to state buildings, roads, water and sewer projects, and the dollar total was a compromise on the governor's request for $400 million.

But as a leading no-compromise legislator, Rep. Art Wittich, said, "Frankly, from a conservative standpoint, it (the infrastructure denial) may be the only thing we did in this session. We have virtually lost everything that we came here to accomplish," as the bipartisan allies passed piece after piece of what he called "truly compromised legislation." His terminology is accurate: Look at Montana’s Medicaid expansion, for instance. It’s the most conservative set-up in the whole country, requiring the needy recipients to pay modest insurance premiums to share the cost. Many eligible Montanans will be hard-pressed to pay the premiums. If that isn't a true compromise, what is?

Montana's bipartisan alliance broke down on some fronts, as the Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, vetoed dozens of bills passed by Republicans, including one that would've set up a task force to study how the state might take over federal lands -- a veto supported by many conservationists. But even on that issue, one of Montana's most prominent Republicans, Congressman Ryan Zinke, sided with conservationists by voting against a similar Republican measure in the U.S. House. The Republican-run U.S. House passed that one, and as the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported, "Zinke's stance has made tea partyers in Montana unhappy." Zinke told a group of outdoor-recreation businesses that while he's a conservative, he's also a "reasonable conservationist."

This is exactly the kind of sunny politics we need everywhere.

Ray Ring is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He lives in Bozeman, Montana, and is the magazine’s former senior editor.

]]>No publisherWriters on the Range2015/06/09 12:35:00 GMT-6ArticleWe can do our part to defuse the Westhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/we-can-do-our-part-to-defuse-the-west
The following is just a sample of what public-land managers have encountered while on the job in the last few years: On a dirt road in Arizona, a man who was paranoid about the federal government aimed a rifle at federal rangers and opened fire. In California, a shooter targeted a firefighter in a national forest. In Oregon, firebombs were hurled at federal campground hosts.

Verbal threats stopping just short of violence can be nearly as frightening: A wild-horse advocate in Wyoming told federal rangers planning a roundup, "You sick bastards ought to be killed ... tortured ... hung upside down ... (and) may your families be tortured." In New Mexico, a couple of ranchers, angry over cattle-grazing regulations, jumped in a pickup and chased rangers, shouting, "(f’ing) pussies ... we’re going to settle this right now!"

We know about these incidents, and more, because High Country News, a nonprofit magazine that covers the West, recently launched an investigation to unearth official reports of threats and violence against the employees of two key federal agencies -- the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management -- since 2010.

Of course, hostility against the federal government has smoldered in the West for a long time. History and geography endowed our region with most of the nation's public land, and many presidents and sessions of Congress have sought to protect wildlife and ecosystems by imposing environmental regulations. Though many Westerners appreciate the federal presence, some respond with anger and hatred. For the thousands of federal employees on the front lines, managing the federal land can be dangerous.

The most extreme anti-federal flare-ups make national news, such as the one earlier this year in Nevada, when rancher Cliven Bundy faced off against BLM employees. When the BLM tried to round up Bundy's cattle for trespassing on federal land, some of Bundy's crew took up sniper positions and threatened to shoot it out. The BLM temporarily backed off to avoid bloodshed. Similar incidents occur frequently without ever making the news.

The rangers and other federal employees also face what you might call generic violence from run-of-the-mill criminals and drunks, and nothing much can be done about that. But reasonable Westerners can try to tone down the extreme anti-federal sentiment that spurs confrontations. For instance, the editors and writers for Range magazine -- popular reading material for ranchers -- covered the Bundy standoff by describing the BLM as a communist and "eco-jihad" force that uses "potentially murderous aggression" to drive ranchers off federal land. The publication also praised "the everyday Americans showing up from all around the West ... bearing semiautomatic .223 rifles" to resist the BLM's "jihad." This is irresponsible journalism.

Other incendiary pundits include some of the talking heads on Fox News, who embraced Bundy's armed rebellion and his claims that federal land and related regulations were an illegal imposition on Westerners. Fox's Sean Hannity, who also hosts a national talk-radio show, compared Bundy's rebellion to our nation's 1776 war for independence from British rule: "We would never (have) won any of these wars from the Revolutionary War on up if we didn't have faith and courage and fighting for something."

Utah's Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollock went further, telling a congressional hearing last July, "Right or wrong, some equate BLM’s law enforcement operations to the Gestapo of the World War II era." And Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, sponsor of a new Utah law that demands federal land be turned over to the locals, said that the National Park Service was using "Gestapo tactics" in denying tourists access to parks during the October 2013 shutdown of the federal government.

This is nonsense. Any sane person knows that the BLM and the Park Service are not rounding up ranchers and tourists and hauling them to concentration camps and gas chambers.

Most Westerners respect the role of government and are willing to work with federal employees to solve our region’s problems. Those who oppose environmental regulations on federal land have nonviolent options, including court actions and electing presidents and members of Congress who agree with them. There’s more than enough violence and extremism in the world today. Let’s encourage reasonable Westerners across the political spectrum to speak out for civility toward the federal employees. Let’s do our part to try to defuse the West.

Ray Ring is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He is a contributing editor for the magazine and is based in Bozeman, Montana

]]>No publisherWriters on the Range2014/11/18 04:00:00 GMT-7ArticleThe BLM fails to provide public recordshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/the-blm-fails-to-provide-public-records
The agency's main Freedom of Information Act office appears incompetent or overworked.When High Country News began using the Freedom of Information Act to gather official reports of threats against federal employees in the West, we didn't expect that the main obstacle would arise in one federal agency's headquarters.

So we were surprised by the poor performance of the Bureau of Land Management's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office in Washington, D.C. Its response to our request for public records can only be described as dysfunctional.

We began our investigation in late January by filing FOIA requests with dozens of BLM field offices around the West, because the employees on the front lines bear the brunt of the threats and harassment. Then in February, the BLM's chief FOIA officer, Ryan Witt, urged us to "consolidate" our far-flung FOIA requests into a single request handled by Witt's office in D.C. Witt promised that running it all through his office would be would be more efficient, but as it has worked out, it's been the opposite.

A comparison illustrates the problem: We filed similar FOIA requests with U.S. Forest Service offices around the West, and by the end of June, that agency had provided more than 2,300 pages of records of threats targeting its employees. At that point, the BLM's FOIA office in D.C. had provided only 123 pages of records of incidents targeting BLM employees.

For two months after that, Witt and the FOIA officer to whom he delegated our request, Ore Fashola, stopped responding to us. Finally a lawyer in Witt's office, Mike Sarich, helped spring loose several hundred additional pages in September. At that point, Fashola promised to send a "final" release of the main BLM records by mid-September -- but since then, we've received nothing more from that set of records.

On Oct. 14, Witt phoned to explain why his office hasn't yet provided the BLM's account of the Arizona shooting. He said he'd discovered that his agency has a separate set of records covering incidents in which BLM law-enforcement rangers use their guns. That set of records is bound to have the most serious BLM incidents related to our FOIA request, yet Witt's office overlooked them until we pressed for answers. Witt has now promised that we'll get that set of records within a month, and it will include four or five incidents in which rangers drew their weapons. Forgive us if we're skeptical about the timeline.

Whether the problem stems from overworked BLM FOIA officers in Witt's office, incompetence, political manipulation, or a paranoiac secrecy in the BLM's law-enforcement leadership, we encourage the head of the BLM, Neil Kornze, and his boss, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, to fix the problems in the BLM's FOIA office.

Ray Ring is a senior editor for High Country News.

]]>No publisherOpinionBureau of Land ManagementPublic LandsDefuse the WestNot on homepageSagebrush Rebellion2014/10/30 16:05:00 GMT-6ArticleDefuse the Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/defuse-the-west
Public-land employees are easy targets for a violent, government-hating fringe. One bullet smacked the hood of Brunk’s truck close to where he was sitting in the cab. Another shattered Rinehart’s windshield, temporarily blinding him with fragments of glass. As the shooter drove away, Brunk raced after him. Rinehart followed as soon as he cleared his eyes, and later squeezed off a dozen shots with his AR-15 rifle, putting holes in the shooter’s truck. But the man escaped.

Five days later, 69-year-old Tracy Levi Thibodeaux, a former building inspector, was arrested at a rural post office while picking up his Social Security check. Investigators sifted through his history to determine why he’d shot at the rangers. Apparently, the economic recession had pushed him over the edge; he blamed the federal government for some of his problems and thought that it was harassing him, even trying to kill him. He’d frequently expressed anti-government views, calling talk-radio shows and writing letters to newspapers. Initially, he was found mentally unfit for trial, but that decision was later reversed, and in 2013, he was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to prison.

Thibodeaux’s eruption, though remarkable for its violence, was by no means rare. In recent years, other angry Westerners have fired guns at federal employees and even hurled firebombs at campground hosts. Verbal threats and ugly altercations have occurred with disturbing regularity, as government folks were hit with these insults and worse: “You stupid whore!” ... “You better not write me a ticket! I’ll kick your fucking ass!” ... “There is a bullet with your name on it.” ... “Fuck you, you fucking faggots.”

We know about these incidents, and more, because High Country News has launched a sweeping investigation to unearth the official reports, using the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. We’ve focused on threats and violence against employees of two key federal agencies — the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management — both on- and off-duty, from 2010 to early 2014. The agencies have not yet provided HCN with all of the information we’ve requested, but what they’ve divulged so far reveals an ominous pattern of hostility toward government employees.

Of course, such sentiments have smoldered in the West for a long time. History and geography conspired to endow our region with most of the nation’s federal land, and Westerners have responded to the federal presence with both appreciation and hatred. For the thousands of workers tasked with managing the federal lands, enforcing laws and regulations can be dangerous. A few years before Thibodeaux shot at the BLM rangers, for instance, a ranching patriarch in the same area, Luther Wallace “Wally” Klump, refused to obey BLM regulations on cattle on federal land and was jailed for contempt of court. Klump warned The New York Times in 2004 that he might pick up a gun to battle the feds: “The Second Amendment is my ace, and they know it’s my ace. The founding fathers gave the individual a gun to fight the tyranny of the government. What’s that mean? The bearer can kill someone in government if the reason is justified. But it’s never been tested. I told them, you take those cows, I’ll kill you as mandated by the Second Amendment.”

The most extreme anti-federal flare-ups — like the one earlier this year in Nevada, when rancher Cliven Bundy and his gun-toting supporters faced off with armed BLM employees over grazing regulations — garner national headlines. When the BLM tried to round up Bundy’s cattle for trespassing on federal land, some of Bundy’s crew took up sniper positions and threatened to shoot it out, so the BLM temporarily backed off to avoid bloodshed. Right-wing talk shows instantly jumped to Bundy’s defense, lauding him as a hero fighting federal oppressors. HCN’s own investigation began well before Bundy made headlines, because we’d already observed the rising tension and suspected that similar incidents occur pretty much daily without ever making the news.

Paul Lachine

In December 2012, HCN’s then-online editor, Stephanie Paige Ogburn, filed a single Freedom of Information request for reports of harassment of BLM employees in southern Utah. She turned up several incidents, including one in which an all-terrain-vehicle driver, apparently angry over the BLM banning motors on some trails, used his machine to tear up the yard of a BLM employee’s home. This January, we expanded our investigation, seeking reports from more than a hundred BLM and Forest Service offices from Alaska to New Mexico. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in the Washington, D.C., area, offered guidance on tracking down public records, and Marshall Swearingen, HCN’s Freedom of Information project manager, handled most of our communication with the agencies.

From thousands of pages of official reports, we’ve culled dozens of the worst incidents and summarized each one. We passed over the ordinary rowdy encounters with inebriated civilians, focusing on the serious confrontations with anti-government overtones.

We’re letting the official reports do most of the talking. Though they’re prone to bureaucratic language and censored to preserve the privacy of individuals who were involved, they provide vivid, and often frightening, snapshots from the West’s front lines.

We’ve also created a map locating the worst incidents and links to PDFs of the official reports.

From conversations with Forest Service, BLM, National Park Service and other federal employees, we know that many incidents go unreported. So we invite anyone who has information to contact us, using a special tipster form on the web page. We’ll consider investigating any tips we receive, and we promise not to reveal the tipster’s identity.

By highlighting the danger that federal employees face, we hope to put those who foment the hostility on notice: It’s time to rein it in before more people get hurt. Range magazine editors and writers covering the Bundy standoff, for instance, didn’t help matters by describing the BLM as a communist and “eco-jihad” force that uses “potentially murderous aggression” to drive ranchers off federal land. They also praised “the everyday Americans showing up from all around the West ... bearing semiautomatic .223 rifles” to resist the BLM’s “jihad.”

Other irresponsible pundits include some of the talking heads on Fox News, who embraced Bundy’s armed rebellion and his claims that federal land and related regulations are an illegal imposition on Westerners. Sean Hannity, a Fox celebrity who also hosts a nationwide radio show, compared Bundy’s rebellion to our nation’s 1776 war for independence from British rule: “We would never (have) won any of these wars from the Revolutionary War on up if we didn’t have faith and courage and fighting for something.”

Those who should rein it in also include Utah’s Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollock, who told a congressional hearing in July that, “Right or wrong, some equate BLM’s law enforcement operations to the Gestapo of the World War II era.” That comparison basically encourages Westerners to take up arms against BLM employees the same way that heroes resisted Nazi genocide of European Jews.

The vast majority of Westerners respect the role of government and are willing to work with federal employees to solve our region’s problems. We hope to encourage them to speak out for civility and reasonableness. There’s more than enough violence and extremism in the world today. Let’s do our part to try to defuse the West.

This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund. Map created by Brian Calvert and Marshall Swearingen.

Ray Ring is an HCN senior editor based in Bozeman, Montana. Marshall Swearingen is a former HCN intern, now serving as HCN’s FOIA project manager and freelancing; he’s also based in Bozeman.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsNational Park ServiceBureau of Land ManagementPoliticsRanchingU.S. Forest ServiceDefuse the WestFeaturesSagebrush Rebellion2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRelated stories in this issuehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/reports-from-the-front-lines/related-stories-in-this-issue
Defuse the West

]]>No publisher2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbReports from the front lineshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/reports-from-the-front-lines
Excerpts from official accounts of threats against U.S. Forest Service and BLM employees. Someone fired seven rifle shots at a uniformed Forest Service fire-prevention employee driving an agency pickup in California’s Tahoe National Forest. “The firefighter reported seeing three (suspects) above the roadway on an open embankment, one of which was holding a rifle. ... The firefighter then observed (the rifleman) raise the rifle and point it at him inside his USFS vehicle. The firefighter quickly backed his vehicle away (and heard) two shots fired. As the firefighter continued backing away from the scene ... he heard five more shots fired.” Investigators found footprints and spent rifle cartridges, but never cracked the case. —July 28, 2010

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A “loud and confrontational” man walked into a BLM office in Moab, Utah, on two days and repeatedly threatened to kill and beat up men and women working there. He was upset over road closures and charged that “everyone here is a tree-hugger.” Waving his arms angrily, he said he was a Vietnam War vet “trained to kill people” and wanted to “break some bones. ... Come outside, we’ll settle this.” One employee reported, “I got scared and ran to the back office (thinking) he was going to explode.” They locked the office after he left, fearing he would return with a gun. Later, he told a sheriff’s deputy that “on occasion he rides his ATV out on a ridge and waits with his .300 Winchester rifle for a BLM employee to drive by” and that he “knows where to dispose of bodies so they will not be found.”—Oct. 13-15, 2010

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The Idaho state director of the Bureau of Land Management was threatened during the annual Governor’s Trail Ride. Federal, state and local officials, led by Republican Gov. Butch Otter, gathered in Owyhee County for the ride and its forum on “public land issues.” One speaker — an anti-federal activist from Elko County, Nevada — “bashed” the BLM over sage grouse management. Then the activist approached the Idaho BLM director in an “aggravated” manner, wagging his finger and complaining that the agency’s grouse concerns had hampered wind farm development and oil and gas drilling. The activist told the BLM director that “he had better not show his face in Elko County.”

During the forum, there was also talk of throwing a rope over a tree branch and hanging someone; the name of the target, apparently a government official, was redacted in the incident report. —June 27, 2012

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[SIDEBAR]

Ranchers confronted Forest Service employees trying to keep cattle out of a fenced riparian area in New Mexico’s Lincoln National Forest. The employees felt “uneasy” because the ranchers were “huddled up” at their two pickup trucks and had apparently tied back the fence to keep it open “as if to send a message.” One rancher was “very aggressive in his demeanor ... taking a fighting stance,” and shouting, “Fuck you, you fucking faggots.” One or more of the ranchers also hollered, “I can’t believe you’re fencing out my cows because of some stupid mouse (probably a species protected by the Endangered Species Act). ... That gate is going to stay open.”

As the employees retreated in a Forest Service truck, one or more ranchers drove after them, screaming obscenities: “Fucking faggots ... fucking pussies, pull over (and) get out of the truck. We are going to settle this right now. ... Let’s go, right here!” —May 17, 2013

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A man harassed a female Forest Service employee shopping in a rural grocery store near La Pine, Oregon, saying “how corrupt the government was,” and adding that the next time he “saw a government truck unattended (he) would make sure it would not make it back to the Forest Service compound.” He also accused her of conspiring to start wildfires. The employee, who was “visibly very upset,” feared the man might do her “physical harm.” —Aug. 23, 2010

•••

In a Forest Service office in Sandpoint, Idaho, “an individual came into the front desk area ... loud and upset ... threatening us with having targets on our backs and starting civil war if Obama wins re-election. ... He threatened to shoot Forest Service employees (and said he) has many friends in the area who would like to shoot some Forest Service workers. ... This went on for an estimated 30 minutes.” —Oct. 18, 2012

•••

Someone threw a firebomb at BLM campground hosts in the Wildwood Recreation Site near Oregon’s Mount Hood. “Two BLM recreation site hosts ... were performing campsite duties and traveling in a golf cart (when they) heard a loud noise and the sound of shattered glass. They pulled over ... and discovered the remnants of a Molotov cocktail. There was a sock, which was used as a wick, still burning, diesel fuel and a broken Corona glass bottle. (They) realized this device had been thrown at them.”

It wasn’t the campground’s first firebomb: “Previously that morning, two other devices were found by a BLM employee on the pavement in the same area. ... These devices were constructed in the same manner as the Molotov cocktails thrown at the campground hosts. ... There is a history of vandalism, trespass, dumping and destruction of vegetation in the wooded area near the incident site.” —July 24, 2013

•••

A man made an anonymous phone call to a Forest Service employee’s home in Townsend, Montana: The employee’s wife “answered the phone at her personal residence, where she resides with her husband and their children. A male with a foreign accent asked, ‘Can I speak with (the employee)?’ (She) advised that he was not available and asked to take a message. The male stated, ‘Yes, I am going to hunt him down and kill him.’” —Aug. 27, 2013

•••

A 6-foot-2-inch tall suspect, probably male (the name was redacted on the report), walked into the Methow Valley Ranger Station of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in central Washington, upset about logging-permit procedures. He “became frustrated and started saying something about being a member of possibly an anti-government group (and) said that they were going to take back the federal land.” He also said that he “should go out and get what he wanted and take a chance of getting a ticket.” Then he raised his voice and “made a gun gesture” toward a law-enforcement officer. —Oct. 1, 2012

•••

An off-duty BLM employee, who was having a drink with friends in a northern Idaho bar, was approached by a man who “started giving him grief about a recently fenced-off area” managed by the BLM. Later that evening, the man threw a salt shaker at the BLM employee, hitting him in the chest. —Feb. 4, 2011

•••

In Arizona’s Prescott National Forest, a man became angry when he was approached by a female Forest Service fire-prevention employee checking for abandoned campfires: He yelled obscenities and “began revving his engine and jerking his vehicle backward and forward.” He said he would “shoot down” any law enforcement officers who pulled guns on him and repeated the threat several times. The employee “felt very intimidated and concerned for her safety (and) the safety of other Forest Service employees.” —Aug. 30, 2010

•••

One snowy day, when a Forest Service employee in Montana’s Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest told a snowmobiler not to enter a closed area at a trailhead, the “violator cussed at FS employee and drove sled into closure anyway.” —April 22, 2010

•••

Two drug traffickers threatened a BLM employee in a sports bar in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The employee reported: “I was on the patio (of the bar) when I was approached by a Hispanic male ... no visible tattoos, no scars, and no distinguishing features. He said he knew who I was and that I needed to work with them to smuggle drugs in a government vehicle. He said I would make $5,000 a run. I told him I would not do it. ... He left and returned in a few minutes with a second Hispanic male ... The first male said I needed to work with them or they would kill me and my family. I again repeated that I would not work with them. The second male hit me across the bridge of my nose. I threw a few punches and took off running ... across the parking lot.” —Aug. 22, 2013

•••

A man walked into the Council Ranger District office of Payette National Forest in Idaho and “made comments regarding shooting people, which the employees interpreted to mean that (he) was threatening to shoot Forest Service employees.” He was upset about road closures in the forest, and said: “This is our forest. You have no right to close roads. ... We are getting fed up. ... This is going to go to war and we’ll start shooting if it keeps up.” And he asked them if they’d heard about a Forest Service employee in Utah who got “blowed away.”

When law enforcement officers later questioned the man, he “differentiated between shooting people that may only wound them, and killing them. (He) stated that he was not planning to shoot or kill anyone, but he wanted to get the Forest Service’s attention, so he planned the incident.” —Sept. 29, 2010

•••

After a Forest Service employee in Lemmon, South Dakota, reported him for violating regulations, a man told the employee’s wife that he was going to “kick (the employee’s) ass.” He called the employee a “son of a bitch” and said, “The Forest Service needs to get their ass out of this country!” When he was issued a citation for his threats, he said, “I am not going to pay it. ... You better have a goddamn good lawyer.” —Sept. 28, 2010

•••

People who brought horses into a prohibited area of Montana’s Gallatin National Forest threatened the Forest Service employee who spoke to them about it. One “became very argumentative and (said) that he had been coming up there for 50 years.” Another “walked over with a very large alcoholic mixed drink” and “became very loud, argumentative and hostile” and “threw down his mixed alcohol drink and squared off in a hostile and assaultive posture,” calling the employee a “Tree Cop” and saying, “I could have gotten a gun out and killed you.”—Sept. 6, 2013

•••

A “crazy guy” called a BLM office in Bishop, California, and “wouldn’t stop calling” for two days. He “called the front desk employees liars and told (name redacted), ‘I’m going to come over there and hurt you.’ ... (He) called the employees lying bitches and said, ‘I’m going to shut you up.’” —Aug. 16, 2013

•••

A man aimed a rifle at a Forest Service employee who tried to handcuff the man’s wife in the Little Belt Mountains in Montana’s Lewis and Clark National Forest. The couple had driven into a prohibited area while deer hunting. The woman, who refused to show her hunting license, said she “did not have to put up with Gestapo government officials.” When the Forest Service employee tried to handcuff her, she resisted, and then, as the employee later reported: “I noticed (the suspect) on top of the hill with a rifle. (He) was yelling ‘Hey, get the fuck away from my wife.’ He repeated this several times (holding his rifle) at chest and shoulder height directed toward me. ... I felt extremely threatened.” —Nov. 26, 2011

•••

An intoxicated man threatened Forest Service employees during a public meeting about the pine-beetle epidemic in Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota. He “interrupted the meeting on several occasions by verbally expressing (a negative) opinion of the U.S. Forest Service through profanity and open-ended, unspecific threats holding the (agency) responsible for the pine-beetle epidemic.”

Later that evening, as the man was being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, he again mentioned his “dislike of the U.S. Forest Service and its employees,” saying that he would not want “to kill anyone without good reason, but some individuals need to be dealt with.” He had “an extensive criminal history dating back to 1978 for DWI, Assault, Drug Use and Resisting Arrest.” —Oct. 27, 2011

•••

A man scuffled with two BLM employees who wanted to cite him for not having a proper ATV registration on a back road in the mountains near Silverton, Colorado. This confrontation began when the BLM employees, driving marked agency ATVs, stopped a group of off-road vehicle drivers. The man refused to climb off his ATV, so they wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him. In the melee, he hit one BLM employee on the head and tried to grab one by the groin, saying things like: “I will fuck your world up ... Fuckin’ got a hard-on right now I bet ... queer-ass piece of shit ... let me touch your wiener.” —July 6, 2012

•••

Paul Lachine

A man indirectly threatened Forest Service employees while talking with someone else in Buffalo Gap National Grassland in South Dakota: He pulled out a .45-caliber pistol and said, “This is for the Forest Service”and “called the Forest Service ‘sons a bitches’ and asked ‘are you gonna help me fight them? ... They are taking over everything.’” —April 16, 2010

•••

A female Forest Service employee reported an altercation with a man who appeared to be involved in locking a public road in Rio Grande National Forest in Colorado: “At this gate I found a chain and two locks, neither of which were a Forest Service lock. ... A Jeep came down the road and parked in the middle of the road. ... As I stood next to the Jeep holding the chain and locks (a young man driving the Jeep) started to pull (the chain and locks) away from me.”

As the confrontation escalated, the Forest Service employee reported, “I became concerned that if (he) gained possession of the chain/locks he would be able to swing them out the Jeep window and hit me in the head. ... I grabbed his wrist trying to keep control... (He) repeatedly stated we were not going up that road, that (he) had orders to stop anyone from going up that road, it was private property. ... (He) also made numerous comments about suggested sexual encounters he would recommend for me to help the situation (i.e. go find a boyfriend to fuck or a husband to fuck or maybe I’d be happier with other females) along with other derogatory statements toward me.” —June 8, 2012

•••

A man wrote a 117-page letter threatening Forest Service employees in White River National Forest in Colorado: The signed, hand-written letter made “accusations” against the Forest Service, including a female employee described as “Little Smokey Bear Girl,” as well as a former sheriff, calling them all “homosexual freaks” involved in a “faggot bastard secret society” that is conspiring to murder people. The man had a history of stalking people and threatening to burn down their homes. —Oct. 21, 2011

•••

Two men on horseback argued with a mounted Forest Service employee about constitutional issues, miles into Wyoming’s Washakie Wilderness in Shoshone National Forest: The confrontation began when the employee “asked the two men if there was an emergency, if anything was wrong. ... The first man asked what right (the employee) had to ask them who they were.” The employee told them, “I am plainly in uniform, I see two men trotting down the trail, maybe something is wrong.” The first man answered, “You feds think you have authority over everything in Wyoming. I will not tell you anything.”

The first man then “burst out” with “you are a good example of the feds overreaching” and “continued to explain the Wyoming Constitution and how the feds did not have authority in the state of Wyoming.” So the Forest Service employee “began a conversation about the federal U.S. Constitution.” After several minutes of disagreement over which constitution was the law of the land, the employee asked the man for an I.D.; the man refused to comply.

The Forest Service employee suspected that bighorn sheep were being illegally hunted in the area and asked the men if they owned a truck and horse trailer with expired license plates at the trailhead. They refused to answer, again saying that “states rights” trumped the federal government. “The conversation went silent.” Ultimately, the employee told them to “have a good day” and rode off to meet a state game warden deeper in the backcountry. —Oct. 19, 2012

•••

In the public-comment process for a BLM plan to round up wild horses in Wyoming, a wild-horse advocate sent a lengthy email to BLM employees, saying: “You sick bastards ought to be killed. ... We are so goddamned sick of your cruelty to our American wildlife. ... Fuck you go to hell where u bastards deserve (to be) terrified tortured and hung upside down (and) may your families be tortured.” —Sept. 17, 2013

•••

When two Forest Service employees driving ATVs on a road in Bighorn National Forest near Ten Sleep, Wyoming, approached a slow-moving Chevy pickup, the driver swerved repeatedly to prevent them from passing. Eventually, the pickup driver stopped and “grabbed (one Forest Service employee) by the throat,” saying the feds “did not own the road.” —Oct. 15, 2012

•••

An Arizona man, inspired by an anti-Forest Service newspaper column, threatened employees of several national forests in the state. He was “upset about road closures, wilderness restrictions and other regulations,” and wrote (with little attention to grammar) that there will be “an all out revolt from Hunters, Campers and Prospectors in every state ... quit closing the access to already existing roads & trails or there’s going to be an all-out war against you ie the U.S. Forest Service, Bullets ... and people dieing ... So Don’t Tread On Me (and) My Rights to make use of my state & my Country Or there will be trouble I Guarantee you!” Previously, he’d been convicted of stalking and harassment. —Dec. 13, 2010

•••

An oilfield worker threatened an off-duty BLM employee during a birthday celebration for the employee’s wife in a bar in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The employee had previously cited the man for violating oilfield regulations. In the bar, the man showed a lot of “animosity” and repeatedly told the employee to “watch (your) back, ‘cause I’m coming after you.” He also repeatedly rubbed the employee’s wife’s arm in a way that made her feel threatened. —Jan. 31, 2012

•••

An angry man threatened Forest Service employees in the Ashton, Idaho, office of Caribou-Targhee National Forest: “Customer came in office with an attitude against the govt ... cursing the govt, saying it was all his forest, all would be shot.” —Oct. 17, 2012

•••

An inebriated man who’d gotten his pickup stuck on a rough road in Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest in Bear Lake County, Idaho, yelled obscenities at a Forest Service road-grader crew, complaining that they weren’t smoothing the road properly. When the man tried to pull the driver of the road-grader out of the cab, the driver, a Forest Service employee, kicked and punched him to keep him at bay.

Later that day, the same man drove a Ford Bronco at another Forest Service employee who approached him in a campground. That employee “heard the man’s (Bronco) accelerate and ... saw the man looking right at him,” but dodged the Bronco.

When that employee climbed into a Forest Service truck to give chase, the Bronco’s driver turned around and aimed at the Forest Service truck “at high rate of speed.”The employee “anticipated a collision and put his vehicle into park and put (his) foot on the brake and leaned back to prepare for impact.” The Bronco driver swerved at the last second and clipped the side and front of the Forest Service truck, causing more than $1,000 in damage. —Aug. 5, 2010

•••

A man in a white pickup made threatening gestures at an off-duty BLM ranger driving a marked BLM vehicle toward the Burning Man Festival in northwest Nevada. The man drove beside the employee’s vehicle, matching its speed while “deliberately making motions of a hand-gun firing” seven to 10 times. Eventually the employee pulled in front of the pickup, and the man began “yelling and screaming” and “swerving back and forth, almost hitting (the BLM) vehicle.” —Aug. 27, 2010

•••

An angry man threatened a Forest Service employee who was preparing to drive a snowmobile up a trail in the Greys River Ranger District of Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming. The employee reported, “I noticed a red Subaru heading towards me very quickly (in the parking lot at the trailhead) ... When (the Subaru) came to an abrupt stop next to my truck, I was immediately asked in an angry and confronting manner how much it would f-ing cost to snowmobile up the river ... he wanted to f-ing know how much he was paying as a taxpayer for me to ‘joy-ride’ up the river. I explained to him that I don’t ‘joy-ride,’ I perform safety patrols, compliance checks on regulations, winter closure checks etc., when he interrupted me and said that I was f-ing stupid.”

The man “then said that (another Forest Service employee) was a f-ing jerk too ... he hoped (the other employee) was ‘f-ing 6 feet underground where he deserves’ and ... knew a lot of other people that hoped (the employee) was ‘f-ing dead too, all of you.’ ... (He) continued to shout expletives at me. ... I said to have a good day, and he sped out of the parking lot shouting f-you.” —April 16, 2010

•••

An unidentified man phoned the Toiyabe National Forest office in Sparks, Nevada, to “complain about wilderness reservation procedures. ... He became hostile and made comments such as: ‘It was (his) job in life to take down Forest Service offices any way he could.’ Also that it was his ‘duty to make it hard for Forest Service offices and people in any way he could.’ Also, that the Forest Service ‘wastes people’s time and money, and takes away their rights.’ ... The voice sounded similar to a voice message left during Christmas time in which the caller used profanity on the Forest Service answering machine.” —March 18, 2011

•••

A man called and threatened a female BLM employee in the agency’s office in Dickinson, North Dakota. He wanted the BLM to give his wife $5,000 that the agency had collected from a drilling company operating on her land -- apparently a penalty for improper drilling -- but when the employee explained that the BLM intended to keep the money, he told her that he would “take it up the old-fashioned Indian way” by shooting her with a shotgun. The investigation found that he was a “convicted felon with an extensive criminal history.” —Nov. 29, 2011

•••

An irate man grabbed the arm of a male Forest Service employee at a public meeting in Arcadia, California, trying to get his attention. The man followed the employee outside the meeting, “shaking his finger in (the Forest Service employee’s) face in a very persistent manner that appeared threatening.” A Forest Service law enforcement officer who observed the confrontation told the man to “back off.” —May 30, 2012

•••

Someone sent an anonymous letter to the Cleveland National Forest headquarters in Southern California, threatening to kill any employees involved in a decision to allow construction of a power line through the forest. The letter said, “You (a specific employee) are the main target. ... Watch your back, because there is a bullet with your name on it. As for the rest of the people responsible, their days are numbered too. Fuck you.” —Jan. 31, 2011

•••

A landowner confronted a BLM employee who was surveying public-land boundaries near his private land, near Elk City, Idaho. He said, “Fucking BLM. If I see you on my property I will kick your ass.”Later he said that the BLM surveyors were “sneaking around like snakes,” and if anyone tried to arrest him for making threats, he would resist. The BLM found that one of his buildings was on public land. —July 28, 2010

•••

A man with “a history of disliking the Forest Service and its employees, as well as illegally outfitting and guiding” in Stanislaus National Forest, insulted and tried to trip a Forest Service employee during a public meeting in Greeley Hill, California. The employee — “wearing a full law enforcement uniform” — was crossing the room to show people a map on the wall. The suspect, who was part of a group of men, “began to snicker” as the employee walked by, then “abruptly” moved his leg and bumped the employee’s knee in “an obvious attempt” to trip him.

The Forest Service employee sidestepped the move, then heard “lots of snickering and saw most of the men in the group looking at (him) in a despising manner.” The employee spent the rest of the meeting standing against the wall in a defensive posture. Later, the employee learned that the man had “commented that if anyone from the USFS tried to stop him while he was on his OHV (off-highway vehicle), he would not stop.” —Jan. 6, 2010

•••

Paul Lachine

A large angry man threatened a female Forest Service employee at the Little Rock Dam Recreation Area in Angeles National Forest in Southern California. The confrontation began when she told a party of rafters that they were floating in an area that was off-limits due to the risk of spreading invasive quagga mussels. Some of them pulled their rafts to shore, but others jumped from one raft into the water and swam away. In response, she collected that raft, but the angry man, who was roughly 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds, later approached her in the parking lot, yelling, “You stupid bitch, who the fuck do you think you are, taking my raft from me, you fucking bitch, how dare you.”

She tried to coax him away from small kids who were in the parking lot. He told her, “You stupid whore, you just think you can do whatever you want ... to make all our recreation go away. ... You’re just one of those environmental bitches who just think that you know it all. ... You are just as stupid as the BLM.”

She remained calm, but when she was stepping over a suspended chain at the edge of the lot, he tried to trip her by rocking the chain with his foot. She attempted to call for backup on her cellphone and handheld radio, but was out of signal range. As he loaded his raft into his van, she tried to write down his license-plate number, but he grabbed for the papers in her hand, scratching her wrist. She managed to write down the information anyway, and then he yelled out the van’s window “stupid cunt bitch” and drove off through a group of bystanders “who had to quickly get out of his driving path.” —Aug. 5, 2012

•••

A “crazed, shirtless” man — “covered in blood” and brandishing a stick — confronted BLM employees who were conducting a mussel survey near Eugene, Oregon. The man also blocked the crew’s route with his Toyota camper. He later told investigators that he was an artist who “survived by eating crayfish and other food he found in the forest.” —Oct. 1, 2012

•••

A man upset about the seasonal closure of a road in Southern California’s Cleveland National Forest phoned the Descanso Ranger District office and threatened the female employee who answered the phone. He told her that he was going to “put a 12-gauge shotgun in someone’s facetil he gets an answer.” —Dec. 5, 2011

•••

A man in Glasgow, Montana, who thought that the BLM was “stealing” from his mining claims, threatened to “kill every one of them BLM employees if given the chance.” An investigation determined that the man was “diagnosed psychotic” and had a history of assaulting people. —Nov. 14, 2013

•••

A man walked into the Happy Camp Ranger District office of Klamath National Forest in Northern California and said he “was going to blow up the office. He made further statements that he would never really do it but told them that is what he feels like doing. (He) was angry with the Forest Service for multiple reasons including the closure of several campgrounds. ... (He) also made statements that he just wanted to kill somebody but again recanted the statement saying that he would never really do it.” —March 13, 2012

•••

An angry man repeatedly phoned a woman working in an office of Idaho Republican Congressman Raúl Labrador and threatened BLM rangers. He thought that rangers surveying public-land boundaries near his mining claim near Riggins, Idaho, “wanted to take his land,” and vowed to take the local BLM manager “behind the woodshed, teach him some manners and do him in.” The woman thought the man was “ramping up ... escalating toward violence,” and “was very concerned about the safety of the survey crew.” She said that “someone with a gun needs to get to the survey crew immediately to protect them.” —May 4-10, 2011

•••

Two female Forest Service employees were checking vehicles entering Lytle Creek Canyon in California’s San Bernardino National Forest for the required “Adventure Pass,” which costs $5 per day or $30 per year. When they started to place a citation on a parked truck that didn’t display a pass, its driver stormed out of the creek area, yelling over and over, “You better not write me a ticket! I’ll kick your fucking ass!” Then he ripped the paper off his windshield and threw it on the ground, yelling, “I told you not to write me a ticket! I’m not paying this shit!”

The man, who was “very angry and was throwing his arms wildly into the air ... continued his swearing/ranting.” They replaced the citation on his windshield, and again he threw it away. Then the man’s father and an unidentified woman appeared and gave the man the keys to the truck. The man climbed into the cab and appeared to be searching for something, claiming he had an annual pass. The employees, however, feared he was looking for a gun. Hoping to defuse the confrontation and call for backup, they began driving away, but as they did so, the man’s father ran up and slapped the side of their truck. —Jan. 31, 2010

•••

A Forest Service employee in California went to a man’s home near Sequoia National Forest to question him about illegal woodcutting. The man “was very uncooperative and irate,” so the employee “left the area to avoid further confrontation.” The next day, the man walked into the forest’s Kernville office, saying that “he had a right to shoot (the Forest Service employee) if he came back to his property.” —Nov. 12, 2013

•••

A man who had been driving off-road in a prohibited area of Sonoran Desert National Monument in Arizona scuffled with three BLM employees who wanted to cite him for the violation. The man locked himself in his pickup, said he could do “whatever the fuck he wanted,” yelled “profanities” and spat in the face of one of the BLM employees. As they tried to pull him out of the pickup, one of them broke a side window to get better access, and it turned into a wrestling match. As they dropped him to the ground and handcuffed him, he was “screaming and resisting the entire time.” —Nov. 10, 2012

•••

The driver of a turbo-charged “large black Ford pickup” on a four-lane Oregon highway near Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest harassed a uniformed Forest Service employee in a marked patrol vehicle. The pickup driver was going 60 mph, but when the Forest Service vehicle approached, the pickup driver slowed to less than 55 and “stayed in the fast lane, failing to yield.” The Forest Service employee, driving between 60 and 65, passed the pickup on the right, but the pickup driver revved his engine and sped up, trying to cut off the employee.

The employee did manage to get past the black pickup, but its driver “continued to accelerate up to the rear” of the employee’s vehicle and “continued to follow at a dangerously close distance” as the road narrowed to two lanes and entered a town, until the employee turned off the highway. —April 14, 2011

•••

Someone made repeated anonymous threatening phone calls to the home of a Colville National Forest employee in eastern Washington. “On several of the phone calls, (the employee) could clearly hear what he believes to be gun shots in the background.” The employee believes that the threats were a “direct result” of his forest work. —Oct. 6, 2011

•••

A BLM employee patrolling a “dance rave” in the desert near Black Rock City, Nevada, observed two men urinating on a “fully marked patrol vehicle.” The employee chased and scuffled with one of the men, deploying his taser. The crowd intervened, pinned the employee to the ground and hit him multiple times in the back. He escaped with the help of an onlooker in a white cowboy hat, and then, “due to the adrenalin dump,” he “began to vomit.” —Sept. 3, 2011

•••

A man driving a van made a threatening gesture at a Forest Service employee in traffic in Colville, Washington. The employee, who had just left a meeting in the Colville National Forest supervisor’s office, was in uniform and driving a Forest Service law-enforcement vehicle. As he passed the van, the man raised “both hands above the steering wheel and cusped them together as if pointing an imaginary pistol.” The man’s “hands twitched up three times as if (he) was simulating the recoil of a fired weapon” with his “lips pursed ... making shooting sounds” — aimed at the Forest Service employee.

The man then pulled into traffic and tailed the Forest Service employee. He passed “aggressively” on the right and acted as if he was going to steer back to the left to cut off the employee’s vehicle. The employee said later that it was clearly “an attempt to intimidate me.” —Jan. 14, 2011

•••

An oilfield worker described as a “pumper” threatened a BLM employee near Buffalo, Wyoming. The employee, who was monitoring the Fence Creek Oil Field, noticed “a flow line running on the ground.” When he asked the pumper about the problem, “a heated conversation took place,” and the pumper said, “Don’t get on me or you won’t like the outcome.” When the employee returned a week later, he found “a hanging rope that was tied to be a noose.”—Sept. 28, 2011

•••

A man made anonymous phone calls to the headquarters of Gallatin National Forest in Montana, saying that after roaming “the countryside,” he’d concluded that the Forest Service should be “spanked severely, and I’m not kidding when I say that.” In a second call, he said: “I have lived in the Tobacco Roots forever. You are killing them. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.” —July 20, 2012

This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund. Map created by Brian Calvert and Marshall Swearingen.

Ray Ring is an HCN senior editor based in Bozeman, Montana. Marshall Swearingen is a former HCN intern, now serving as HCN’s FOIA project manager and freelancing; he’s also based in Bozeman.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsBureau of Land ManagementNational Park ServiceU.S. Forest ServicePoliticsDefuse the WestFeaturesSagebrush RebellionGuns2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBowden the half-mad hikerhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.17/bowden-the-half-mad-hiker
The iconic Southwest writer brought minimal gear but loads of reading material on the trail. When I got to know Chuck Bowden in the 1980s in Tucson, he was beginning to hone his edgy writing into powerful books and news stories — totally pushing the limits of “news.” But what impressed me the most was his edgy hiking. That’s how I view the man on the cover of this issue of High Country News: As a half-mad hiker who happened to be a writer.

In the wake of Bowden’s death on Aug. 30, I’m remembering how, in the heat of the desert summer in 1983, he set out from Mexico at dusk, walking north across the border to understand the experience of undocumented immigrants. Hiking all night, he mingled with migrants and risked confrontation with the Border Patrol. After 16 hours and 45 miles, he reached an Arizona outpost where migrants would catch rides, and lay down on a saloon’s pool table to cool off.

Charles Bowden, during a 1986 winter trek re-enacting Mormon pioneer John Lee’s expedition through the Paria River Canyon, with freezing water and little sunlight.

Jack Dykinga

With his physique — a lean 6-foot-4 — Bowden could rack up the miles. “He would never complain” while enduring blisters, sunburn, cactus thorns that drew blood, sprains and bruises, and dehydration that caused painful kidney stones, recalls Bill Broyles, a schoolteacher who made that moonlight hike and others with Bowden. Once, they began on the shore of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez and trudged through the bleak volcanic Pinacate Range to Ajo, Arizona, roughly 100 miles in a week, retracing the route that the Tohono O’odham Tribe had used for harvesting salt from the sea. On another cross-border hike, they covered more than 200 miles of desert in two weeks. Often they gambled on finding natural springs and potholes for drinking water.

Bowden hiked in gym shoes and carried minimal gear, but lugged around pounds of campsite reading — serious hardback tomes like the 1,000-page Righteous Pilgrim, a biography of pioneering Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, and Insurgent Mexico, written in 1914 by the leftist journalist John Reed.

“The guy had absolute grit,” recalls Jack Dykinga, a photographer who accompanied Bowden on treks through the Utah-Arizona canyon country — including a six-day 50-miler one February slogging through icy slot-canyon pools. They climbed Mexico’s highest peak — 18,491-foot Pico de Orizaba — using crampons on ice fields, and tramped across shadeless desert from Yuma, Arizona, to Palm Springs, California, where daily highs hit the 120s.

Bowden’s writings about his hikes conveyed an intimacy with the natural landscape and denounced our failures to protect it. Thus, he influenced decision-makers to designate conservation areas in both countries — perhaps his greatest legacy. A copy of Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau, a 1996 book by Bowden and Dykinga, for instance, was given to then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who shared it with then-President Clinton. The book encouraged Clinton to protect more than 2 million acres in three new national monuments.

]]>No publisherEditor's note2014/10/13 03:05:00 GMT-6ArticleAdiós Charles Bowdenhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.17/adios-charles-bowden
The writer passed away in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Aug. 30. This summer, HCN decided to profile the Southwest’s edgiest writer, Charles Bowden, because he hadn’t been heard from in a while, and he always had a talent for getting to the heart of who we are as a society and how we treat the landscape. We asked an old friend of his, Utah writer Scott Carrier, to do the profile, and the two men spent several days together in a rustic house on a nature preserve south of Tucson, Arizona. The day after Carrier left, Bowden came down with flu-like symptoms. He returned to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and died there unexpectedly on Aug. 30. The cause of his death has not yet been determined.

Carrier delivered this lively profile before Bowden’s death, and we’d rather not turn it into an obituary, so we’re reporting Bowden’s biography separately.

Charles Clyde Bowden — “Chuck” to his many friends — was born in Joliet, Illinois, on July 20, 1945, and spent most of his childhood in urban neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. His father, Jude, was an Internal Revenue Service attorney who hated his job but had a passion for reading, especially Shakespeare and the Bible, even though he was agnostic. The family moved to Tucson in 1957, when Jude took early retirement and pursued his lifelong interest in the West. Bowden’s mother, Berdina, volunteered in Tucson at Casa de Los Niños, a home for abused children. She was fiercely loyal to all three of her children, no matter how far they roamed.

Bowden inherited his father’s thirst for intellectual exploration and his mother’s liking for underdogs. After graduating from Tucson High School, he earned a bachelor’s in history from the University of Arizona and a master’s in “American intellectual history” from the University of Wisconsin. But he rebelled against any straight-and-narrow path, taking time off to explore the country in the turbulent 1960s, becoming involved in the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi and a massive Washington, D.C., protest against the Vietnam War. Getting his master’s degree did nothing to quell his rebellious streak: He walked out of his defense of his Ph.D. thesis and ditched a teaching job at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He resettled in Tucson in 1971 and perfected his distinctive writerly voice. “I thought to myself, I’m going to go out and write the real history of my time on earth,” he told Carrier in 2005, reflecting on his career. He aimed to “create this endless book like Dickens did with his novels.”

Over the years, Bowden’s prolific book-writing ranged from the desert’s environmental issues, and text for collections of beautiful landscape photos, to the ugliest crime and politics, and his magazine writing appeared in the likes of Harper’s, Esquire and Mother Jones. In his search for meaning in life, he pushed himself hard — taking epic desert hikes with little gear, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes, drinking red wine in the afternoon and frequently pursuing love — including two failed marriages to women who financially supported him, a girlfriend who gave birth to their son, Jesse Bowden Niwa, in 1987, several other long-term relationships and too many flings to count. Five years ago, he moved from Arizona to Las Cruces, where he lived with Molly Molloy, a research librarian who co-authored some of his last works. He wrote in furious bursts beginning before dawn, wearing out a keyboard a year.

Bowden’s survivors, including his sister, Peg (Margaret), and brother, George, suggest that readers honor him by donating to his favorite charities: a mental asylum for the homeless in Ciudad Juárez, called Visión En Acción, c/o 201 Calle Diaz, Sunland Park, New Mexico, 88063; the International Crane Foundation, www.savingcranes; and the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, www.hummonnet.org. A memorial gathering is planned for Nov. 1 — Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos, “a fitting time to remember Chuck,” in his family’s words — from 2 to 5 p.m., at Rock Corral Ranch, Tumacacori, Arizona. Everyone is invited. Bring a memento for the Dia de Los Muertos altar, and your favorite beverage. Chuck, of course, would probably suggest red wine.

]]>No publisherEssaysPeople & PlacesLatest2014/10/13 03:05:00 GMT-6ArticleBowden the half-mad hikerhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.17/charles-bowdens-fury/bowden-the-half-mad-hiker
The iconic Southwest writer brought minimal gear but loads of reading material on the trail. When I got to know Chuck Bowden in the 1980s in Tucson, he was beginning to hone his edgy writing into powerful books and news stories — totally pushing the limits of “news.” But what impressed me the most was his edgy hiking. That’s how I view the man on the cover of this issue of High Country News: As a half-mad hiker who happened to be a writer.

In the wake of Bowden’s death on Aug. 30, I’m remembering how, in the heat of the desert summer in 1983, he set out from Mexico at dusk, walking north across the border to understand the experience of undocumented immigrants. Hiking all night, he mingled with migrants and risked confrontation with the Border Patrol. After 16 hours and 45 miles, he reached an Arizona outpost where migrants would catch rides, and lay down on a saloon’s pool table to cool off.

Charles Bowden, during a 1986 winter trek re-enacting Mormon pioneer John Lee’s expedition through the Paria River Canyon, with freezing water and little sunlight.

Jack Dykinga

With his physique — a lean 6-foot-4 — Bowden could rack up the miles. “He would never complain” while enduring blisters, sunburn, cactus thorns that drew blood, sprains and bruises, and dehydration that caused painful kidney stones, recalls Bill Broyles, a schoolteacher who made that moonlight hike and others with Bowden. Once, they began on the shore of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez and trudged through the bleak volcanic Pinacate Range to Ajo, Arizona, roughly 100 miles in a week, retracing the route that the Tohono O’odham Tribe had used for harvesting salt from the sea. On another cross-border hike, they covered more than 200 miles of desert in two weeks. Often they gambled on finding natural springs and potholes for drinking water.

Bowden hiked in gym shoes and carried minimal gear, but lugged around pounds of campsite reading — serious hardback tomes like the 1,000-page Righteous Pilgrim, a biography of pioneering Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, and Insurgent Mexico, written in 1914 by the leftist journalist John Reed.

“The guy had absolute grit,” recalls Jack Dykinga, a photographer who accompanied Bowden on treks through the Utah-Arizona canyon country — including a six-day 50-miler one February slogging through icy slot-canyon pools. They climbed Mexico’s highest peak — 18,491-foot Pico de Orizaba — using crampons on ice fields, and tramped across shadeless desert from Yuma, Arizona, to Palm Springs, California, where daily highs hit the 120s.

Bowden’s writings about his hikes conveyed an intimacy with the natural landscape and denounced our failures to protect it. Thus, he influenced decision-makers to designate conservation areas in both countries — perhaps his greatest legacy. A copy of Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau, a 1996 book by Bowden and Dykinga, for instance, was given to then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who shared it with then-President Clinton. The book encouraged Clinton to protect more than 2 million acres in three new national monuments.

]]>No publisherEditor's note2014/10/13 03:05:00 GMT-6ArticleAdiós Charles Bowdenhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.17/charles-bowdens-fury/adios-charles-bowden
The writer passed away in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Aug. 30. This summer, HCN decided to profile the Southwest’s edgiest writer, Charles Bowden, because he hadn’t been heard from in a while, and he always had a talent for getting to the heart of who we are as a society and how we treat the landscape. We asked an old friend of his, Utah writer Scott Carrier, to do the profile, and the two men spent several days together in a rustic house on a nature preserve south of Tucson, Arizona. The day after Carrier left, Bowden came down with flu-like symptoms. He returned to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and died there unexpectedly on Aug. 30. The cause of his death has not yet been determined.

Carrier delivered this lively profile before Bowden’s death, and we’d rather not turn it into an obituary, so we’re reporting Bowden’s biography separately.

Charles Clyde Bowden — “Chuck” to his many friends — was born in Joliet, Illinois, on July 20, 1945, and spent most of his childhood in urban neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. His father, Jude, was an Internal Revenue Service attorney who hated his job but had a passion for reading, especially Shakespeare and the Bible, even though he was agnostic. The family moved to Tucson in 1957, when Jude took early retirement and pursued his lifelong interest in the West. Bowden’s mother, Berdina, volunteered in Tucson at Casa de Los Niños, a home for abused children. She was fiercely loyal to all three of her children, no matter how far they roamed.

Bowden inherited his father’s thirst for intellectual exploration and his mother’s liking for underdogs. After graduating from Tucson High School, he earned a bachelor’s in history from the University of Arizona and a master’s in “American intellectual history” from the University of Wisconsin. But he rebelled against any straight-and-narrow path, taking time off to explore the country in the turbulent 1960s, becoming involved in the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi and a massive Washington, D.C., protest against the Vietnam War. Getting his master’s degree did nothing to quell his rebellious streak: He walked out of his defense of his Ph.D. thesis and ditched a teaching job at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He resettled in Tucson in 1971 and perfected his distinctive writerly voice. “I thought to myself, I’m going to go out and write the real history of my time on earth,” he told Carrier in 2005, reflecting on his career. He aimed to “create this endless book like Dickens did with his novels.”

Over the years, Bowden’s prolific book-writing ranged from the desert’s environmental issues, and text for collections of beautiful landscape photos, to the ugliest crime and politics, and his magazine writing appeared in the likes of Harper’s, Esquire, GQ and Mother Jones. In his search for meaning in life, he pushed himself hard — taking epic desert hikes with little gear, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes, drinking red wine in the afternoon and frequently pursuing love — including two failed marriages to women who financially supported him, a girlfriend who gave birth to their son, Jesse Bowden Niwa, in 1987, several other long-term relationships and too many flings to count. Five years ago, he moved from Arizona to Las Cruces, where he lived with Molly Molloy, a research librarian who co-authored some of his last works. He wrote in furious bursts beginning before dawn, wearing out a keyboard a year.

Bowden’s survivors, including his sister, Peg (Margaret), and brother, George, suggest that readers honor him by donating to his favorite charities: a mental asylum for the homeless in Ciudad Juárez, called Visión En Acción, c/o 201 Calle Diaz, Sunland Park, New Mexico, 88063; the International Crane Foundation, www.savingcranes; and the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, www.hummonnet.org. A memorial gathering is planned for Nov. 1 — Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos, “a fitting time to remember Chuck,” in his family’s words — from 2 to 5 p.m., at Rock Corral Ranch, Tumacacori, Arizona. Everyone is invited. Bring a memento for the Dia de Los Muertos altar, and your favorite beverage. Chuck, of course, would probably suggest red wine.

]]>No publisherSouthwestPeople & PlacesLatest2014/10/13 03:05:00 GMT-6ArticleTaking the romance out of farminghttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.13/taking-the-romance-out-of-farming
Some farms are using the river as their sewer.(This editor's note accompanies an HCN magazine cover story headlined: Idaho's sewer system is the Snake River.)

When I was a boy in the Midwest in the 1950s, I liked to walk through the corn fields in late summer. I could disappear deep in the thickets of green stalks that were taller than I was, where the golden corn pollen drifted onto my skin and clothes like fairy dust. Even when snow covered the post-harvest stubble or the bare dirt was being prepared for springtime planting, the fields offered adventure and a hint of wildness, an escape from pavement and the constant pressure of people.

Then, in the early 1970s, I fell in love with the West, and that includes the farms that make our mostly arid region artificially bloom. Living in Colorado, then Arizona, and now Montana, I've enjoyed the flowering fruit trees in spring, the fields of vividly green alfalfa enlivening dry summers, and the lush wheat and barley seed heads rippling in the breeze around harvest time. It seems like a triumph of human endeavor – people in harmony with the landscape. Deer, elk and all kinds of birds feast on the farmers' leftovers. And like most of us, I savor Western farm products, basics like milk, beef, wheat and eggs, and luscious treats like cherries and peaches.

But being a journalist requires looking beyond the surface of things. And the more I've learned about science and the environment, the more concerned I've become about the negative impacts of farming. Most farms today convert diverse ecosystems to monocultures where a single crop is encouraged at the expense of all other species. So much for the romantic notion of farming.

One way to measure industrial farming's impact is to check out the condition of the nearest river, as freelance writer Richard Manning does in our cover story. That's where our farms' irrigation water often comes from, much to the detriment of fish and other aquatic species. And that's where vast amounts of farm fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and the runoff from mountains of cattle manure often end up, polluting the river and further stressing the ecosystem.

Manning, a deep thinker with a strong voice, focuses on the intensive farming along Idaho's sprawling Snake River system, seeing it as a microcosm of agricultural impacts everywhere. And he concludes, sadly, that the farms are using the river as their sewer. All rivers perform this function to some degree, especially here in the West where water is scarce, and particularly in places like southern Idaho, where politics have made ag the king while downplaying – or completely ignoring – environmental concerns.

Today, we're hearing increasing calls for agricultural reform. More and more Westerners care about where their food comes from and how it's produced, as well as how farms treat animals, rivers and whole ecosystems. Manning isn't confident that Idaho's farming can be reformed in the near future, but we hope his timely story helps spur some long-term progress.

]]>No publisherEditor's note2014/08/04 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBorder out of controlhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.10/border-out-of-control
National security runs roughshod over the Arizona wild.From a small plane flying only 1,500 feet above the Arizona desert on a hazy February day, the landscape appears as beautiful as it is inhospitable. The sandy dirt glows in psychedelic orange and yellow, and the little mountain ranges southwest of Tucson look like bristly cactus transformed into stone, thrusting upward to nearly touch the plane. There are few signs of human activity until we approach the Mexican border, where Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, two huge conservation areas, supposedly protect more than a million acres of federally designated wilderness.

"There's one," Cyndi Tuell, a conservationist lawyer, explains over the headset. She has her long reddish hair rubber-banded into pigtails, and her forearm tattoo commemorates Rachel Carson's courageous 1960s Silent Spring broadside against pesticides. Pointing out her window, she adds, "And another one – do you see it?" Quickly the number grows: "Five, six ... 10, 12 ... This really pisses me off. It's worse than I thought."

Tuell is counting "renegade roads" – the vehicle tracks shooting off in all directions from the few legal roads. At least 10,000 miles of renegade roads have been carved into the wilderness areas that make up more than 90 percent of the total area of the monument and refuge – even though wilderness is, by law, supposed to be "untrammeled by man." It's probably the worst violation ever of the spirit of the 50-year-old Wilderness Act.

Even more surprising: Though smugglers and undocumented immigrants sneaking north from Mexico began creating renegade roads decades ago, these days most of them are made by U.S. Border Patrol agents trying to seal off the border. Below us, Border Patrol trucks and ATVs cut across the desert, generating a plume of dust. "A lot of these renegade roads are new," Tuell says. "Every time I fly here, I see more new ones."

Skittish desert bighorn sheep live in these wilderness areas, along with rare Sonoran pronghorn, desert tortoise and unnervingly large blond tarantulas. All of the local wildlife is stressed by the surge in Border Patrol traffic, which continues to bring noise, erosion and human presence to a once-remote corner of the West. Our pilot, Will Worthington – a gray-haired, semi-retired engineer with Lighthawk, a nonprofit conservationist flight service – circles the plane into Mexican air space and back, so we can see how the U.S. government has also fortified this border segment with walls and fences. The barriers further fragment wildlife habitat. Yet few people know about it, partly because most environmental groups shy away from the issue, wary of tangling with national security and immigration politics.

The handful of environmentalists who are involved – like Tuell, who is volunteering her time – can't even use their standard tool, litigation, because Congress has decided that environmental laws do not apply along the U.S.-Mexico border. It's a lopsided battle, fighting the militarized Border Patrol and the politicians who exploit anxiety over national security, and at times, Tuell says, "It seems hopeless." To me, the spiraling tire tracks on the Arizona desert resemble the ancient symbols inscribed into the deserts of Peru and Chile by people of the Nazca culture, more than a thousand years ago. The Nazca likely created their giant geometric shapes for religious purposes. But these Border Patrol designs, which will also persist for a long time, symbolize something darker: our 21st century fear and anger, and a burst of U.S. government lawlessness.

Official bending and breaking of laws is nothing new, of course. Highlights over the last two centuries include the federal government's casual disregard of nearly every treaty made with Native American tribes, and the lax enforcement of voting rights for African-Americans clear up into the 1960s. But recent decades have brought a new wave of official law-breaking. Reacting to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists from the Middle East, the CIA went on a binge of waterboarding and otherwise torturing suspected terrorists in secret rooms overseas. Our continuing imprisonment of such suspects in the U.S. "detention camp" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without trials to determine whether they're guilty, violates U.S. and international laws, according to the United Nations and other watchdogs. Likewise, the National Security Agency is arguably going too far with its pervasive surveillance of U.S. citizens' emails and phone calls.

Federal environmental laws have also been abused in the name of national security. "Congress and the White House have a taste for it, because they can get away with it," says Dinah Bear, an intense former D.C. insider. She was the chief lawyer for the Council on Environmental Quality, which advises presidents about environmental issues, under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and she believes, "This is the most important issue now. They can waive environmental laws that represent 40 years of work and achievement, and take away the rights of citizens to protest it."

Bear backs up her words with legal documents when we meet in her Tucson house. She and her husband, Roger McManus – who worked internationally for the Interior Department – bailed out of D.C. in 2011, but both continue to fight the government's suspension of environmental laws. "It's basically what autocratic nations do – they start waiving laws because they've identified an emergency, real or unreal," McManus says.

The couple witnessed the growing national angst close-up in D.C., well before 9/11. As the number of undocumented immigrants nationwide more than doubled in the 1990s, Congress and President Clinton passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which not only increased deportations, but also authorized the Attorney General to waive the two most important environmental laws – the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (which requires analysis of impacts) – to "ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads" for improving border security.

Initially, the federal government's new power was supposed to be used only to build 14 miles of triple parallel fences in the San Diego area, but then the al-Qaeda terrorists struck in New York and D.C. at the beginning of George W. Bush's presidency, and all political hell broke loose. Congress worked with Bush to combine many agencies, including the Border Patrol, into the new massive Department of Homeland Security, and passed a series of new security measures (mainly the REAL ID Act of 2005) that authorized the Homeland Security Secretary to construct barriers all along the border without bothering to comply with any federal, state or local environmental laws.

The Congressional Research Service called the REAL ID Act the most sweeping suspension of laws in U.S. history, because it "provides a secretary of an executive agency the authority to waive all laws such secretary determines necessary." Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff invoked this authority to issue a series of "waivers" of dozens of laws to impose border security measures, including infrastructure for "surveillance, communication, and detection devices."

The Department of Homeland Security also had the upper hand in a key 2006 Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by the federal lands' caretakers –– the Bush administration's secretaries of Interior and Agriculture. It calls for "a cooperative spirit" among all the agencies to secure the border with minimal environmental impact. But it allows Border Patrol agents to drive pretty much wherever they need to in pursuit of illegal border-crossers. Over the same period, the government greatly increased Border Patrol manpower, from roughly 5,000 in 1995 to more than 21,000 now – putting a lot more agents, and patrols, into the desert.

Environmentalists, and others concerned about such waivers and the unleashing of federal power, filed lawsuits claiming violations of the U.S. Constitution. They lost. Congress' wording authorizing the waivers made lawsuits all but impossible. Says Bear, who was involved in those court battles, "They're taking away the rights of citizens to participate in government decisions."

When I first heard that the desert is being trashed by extra-legal national security measures, I tried to rationalize it: That's too bad, but in today's post-9/11 era, it's a question of priorities. At least the impacts are localized, the populations of most border species are not in trouble, and if environmental laws were invoked, they'd likely cause long delays on critical projects. But as I observe the collateral damage up close, and talk with people who live and work along the border, I begin to wonder, Is the trade-off worth it?

Dan Millis, a lean, bearded Tucson-based Sierra Club staffer, is apparently the only professional environmentalist concentrating on the border issue now. He got involved as a volunteer for No More Deaths, a group that helps undocumented immigrants survive their hellish walks across the desert. In 2008, in a canyon just north of the border, he discovered the body of a 14-year-old Salvadoran girl who had died of exhaustion. Two days later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ticketed him for littering, because he'd left water jugs in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge for thirsty immigrants.

The Sierra Club funded Millis' job in 2008, relying on local grassroots contributions: He spends 70 percent of his work time on problems along the entire Mexican border, from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico. (The rest of his time goes to energy issues.) He drives me out to the San Pedro River Valley southeast of Tucson, a remarkably diverse ecosystem where high-elevation grasslands catch rain, to meet John Ladd, a scruffy fourth-generation cattle rancher operating along 10 miles of the border, and Bill Odle, an even scruffier ex-Marine, who, with his wife, Ellen Logue, built an off-the-grid house a stone's throw from the border. They take us through the ranch, pointing out where Border Patrol agents have cut ranch fences to pursue border-crossers. The agents "tear the shit out of everything – leave every gate open and interfere with my corrals and breeding operations," Ladd says. "They've run over eight of my cows and only paid me for one. Their helicopters chase my cows."

We pass a spot where the Border Patrol has erected a tower, maybe 80 feet tall, equipped with cameras and sensors, and reach "that goddam wall," as both Ladd and Odle call it. It's a 13-foot-high, assertive pedestrian barrier made of rust-colored mesh, marching for more than 20 miles across the grass. "There's wildlife corridors crossing the border, all along here, but the wall cuts them off," Ladd says. He and Odle have observed deer, javelina, black bears, coyotes, bobcats, badgers and snakes being blocked by the mesh wall. "Bears used to wander from mountains in Mexico to mountains on this side, and so did the deer," Ladd says, "but not now." I notice a weird, high-pitched whine: the wind blowing through the fine-wire mesh. "The son-of-a-bitch is also noisy," Odle says.

At the edge of the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, where a rare year-round desert river supports giant cottonwoods, the border runs straight across the river, and the mesh morphs into a vehicle barrier made of steel rails, which permits pedestrian and wildlife passage. A Border Patrol agent, parked on the other bank, watches for anyone who tries to take advantage; agents are supposed to be there 24/7 and keep their headlights on at night. Beyond his truck, the border fortification toughens again – 18-foot-tall steel posts with almost no space between them, topped by steel plates.

The river is "the last remaining wildlife corridor in a 29-mile-long stretch of the wall," says Millis, "and the Border Patrol is hardly acknowledging that." Odle points to a tree along the river where eagles used to nest. When the security measures were installed, the eagles abandoned the nest.

Most of the Arizona-Mexico border has been fortified by now: There are 132 miles of pedestrian barriers (the toughest obstacles, at least 10 feet tall and made of continuous mesh, or steel panels or posts so closely placed that people can't squeeze through them) and 242 miles of looser, variously shaped vehicle barriers, according to American Border Patrol, an Arizona-based group that supports maximum border security. No doubt the barriers and increased patrols have discouraged illegal traffic, but it's difficult to assess how much. Many border-crossers simply cut through or climb the pedestrian barriers, or walk through the vehicle barriers, or use one of the growing number of tunnels underneath the border, and then slip past the patrols.

The number of undocumented immigrants in this country increased every year from 1990 to 2007, then leveled off at around 12 million. But obviously there are many factors at work beyond the security measures. The recent U.S. economic slump has reduced the number of job openings for immigrants, and Mexico's fertility rate has changed dramatically. (From nearly seven births per woman in 1970, it's dropped to only 2.3 births per woman now, which eases the population pressure that helps drive immigration to the U.S.)

The number of Border Patrol arrests each year peaked at roughly 1.7 million back in 1986, when the agency had fewer than one-fourth the number of agents it has now. The arrests declined for a few years, then rebounded to nearly 1.7 million in 2000, when the Border Patrol had fewer than half the current number of agents. Last year, the ramped-up agency nabbed only 421,000 undocumented immigrants, including 127,000 in Arizona.

The Border Patrol, at least on paper, is well aware of the fragile, wild landscape in which it works. Nearly the entire border in Arizona is public land, including several wildlife refuges and a national forest. There are also conservation areas on the Mexican side, and together with private refuges managed by groups like The Nature Conservancy, they help create a rich tapestry of wildlife habitat. The Border Patrol likes to point out that its security measures have reduced the environmental impacts of illegal border-crossers by discouraging that traffic. "We do our best to take environmental considerations into account," says a Tucson Border Patrol agent who works with federal land managers. He notes that the Border Patrol trains agents to be light on the land, and holds occasional meetings with land managers and environmentalists to talk about how things are working out. "But our main interest is national security," says the agent, who prefers not to be named. (The Border Patrol has become so reluctant to release information that a columnist for Tucson's leading newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, recently called it "the most opaque department in the federal government.")

"The Border Patrol is not evil," says McManus. "They agree to talks with us. But I've done a lot of work in other nations, and the kinds of meetings we have now with federal officials (along the border) are reminiscent of the Third World" – the government holds all the power and environmentalists are forced to beg for small concessions. In a typical example, representatives of the Border Patrol, the federal conservation areas, and environmentalists including Bear and McManus held an "Intergovernmental Executive Committee" meeting in Tucson in January 2013. The Border Patrol agreed to tell its agents: "Minimize off-road driving. ... Learn the proper technique for turning around on a one-lane road: back up and off the road, stopping just before the front wheels leave the roadway, and then proceed in the new direction. Doing it the other way – driving off the road with your front wheels, then backing onto the road to switch directions, leaves a sizable gouge when you crank the steering wheel while not moving. It's easy to switch methods, and it makes a big difference."

But there's no way to enforce such promises. Under the terms of the 2006 Memorandum of Understanding, for instance, Border Patrol agents who drive off-road in wilderness areas are supposed to file "incursion reports," but reports are filed in fewer than 40 percent of the cases, says Lee Baiza, superintendent of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument from 2007 to April 2013, when he retired. That means most of what happens is not documented. Baiza also believes that the Border Patrol tends to over-respond to events in the backcountry, citing a case in which more than a half-dozen agents in different vehicles converged on a burned, abandoned car in the desert, when one or two would've sufficed. Moreover, the agents drive on "administrative" dirt roads in the monument that the public is not allowed to use; in the era before the increased border security, those roads were driven only a few times per year by monument staffers, but now the Border Patrol has turned them into "major roads," Baiza says. And the agents' vehicles often tow "drags" – chained-together tires that scrape away old tracks on the dirt roads so that new crossers will leave more obvious traces – in the process deepening and widening the roads.

Many of the Border Patrol agents hired during the 2000s buildup came from distant cities and rural regions very unlike the Arizona desert, so they had no idea that the environment here is so fragile. Now that the workforce is more stable and rooted here, "we're a lot better about area knowledge," says the agent who works with the land managers. But as Charles Van Riper, a Tucson-based research ecologist emeritus for U.S. Geological Survey (a Department of Interior science agency), notes, many of the recent hires are "young, ex-military – they just came back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're used to driving Humvees across the desert."

Vehicle tires leave lasting scars wherever anyone cuts across this desert, breaking soil crusts that were formed over hundreds, thousands, or even a million years. "The soil turns to talc when you drive over it," says Todd Esque, another USGS ecologist who tested soil impacts in northwest Organ Pipe Cactus Monument. Driving an ATV or truck just once across that soil has more impact than 50 hikers, Esque says, creating localized "Dust Bowl" conditions. And once a single driver cuts across the desert, as Van Riper observes, "a road starts, it doesn't end. More and more drivers use it."

Few meaningful studies of the impacts have been done. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an umbrella agency that includes the Border Patrol, has attempted to evaluate and minimize the impacts of some specific projects, such as the construction of "forward operating bases" – but those projects are relatively small. Customs and Border Protection has also assessed the impacts of border walls and fences, but the resulting reports are so generalized and upbeat, environmentalists generally dismiss them as propaganda.

Scientists and other observers have reported a tremendous surge in impacts, though. In Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where barriers were installed on the border from 2006 to 2008 to deter illegal vehicles, aerial surveys showed that off-road driving doubled in 2009, and then more than tripled from 2009 to 2010; roughly 2,500 miles of off-road tracks were documented in 2010 in the monument alone. In the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, according to an estimate published last year by The Wildlife Society, a national group of biologists, illegal border-crossers created nearly 8,000 miles of off-road tracks; the Border Patrol outdid them, creating up to 12,000 miles of additional tracks. The Border Patrol explains that it's simply doing its job: pursuing people who are walking across the desert, or driving to overlooks, or simply "cutting sign" – driving cross-country in search of footprints.

Scientists support what Ladd and Odle say about the toll on wildlife. The habitat near the border consists mainly of island-like mountain ranges and riparian areas separated by tracts of inhospitable desert. As biologist Aaron Flesch told the University of Arizona news service in 2010, "Animals need to move among these small patches of available habitat." But the wildlife corridors tend to run north-south, across the border, so the security measures sever them. That's why The Wildlife Society is pushing Congress to restore environmental laws along the border, and change the infrastructure for the sake of wildlife. The group says the barriers impede the "cross-border movements" of dozens of species, including jaguar, ocelot, jaguarundi, Mexican gray wolves, Sonoran pronghorn, bighorn sheep, kit fox, prairie dogs, and even cactus ferruginous pygmy owls, which mostly fly within 12 feet of the ground – lower than the tops of many of the fences and walls.

A constantly patrolled four-lane dirt road right next to the barriers on the border increases the impacts. Wildlife is "repelled" by all of the infrastructure, says Van Riper. In one incident documented by a Border Patrol agent's snapshots, a female mountain lion in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge ran back and forth along a pedestrian barrier on the border, snarling and screaming frantically; apparently her cub had squeezed through, but the barrier prevented the mother from following. Even the more porous vehicle barriers cause an "insidious alteration of wildlife behavior, dramatically altering home range and movements," Van Riper says, because many species avoid any disturbed areas.

The security measures also interfere with the movement of the desert's most crucial resource: water. When rain falls here, much of it flows over the top of the soil in "sheet runoff," which is important for native vegetation; even deep-rooted mesquite trees can be killed by vehicle tracks that divert and capture sheet runoff, Van Riper says. And where the tight pedestrian barriers on the border cut across desert washes, they block and divert the natural runoff's concentration.

Those higher up the chain of command in D.C. "don't understand what's going on," Van Riper adds. "We know a lot about the number of immigrants and drug busts, but not about the changes to the environment as a consequence of border security measures – it's so low on everybody's priority list." He received funding from the Department of Defense several years ago to develop a general protocol for monitoring the impacts, but then couldn't get funding for actual studies. The Department of Defense is so worried that environmental concerns might interfere with security measures, "they think any research will be bad for them."

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You might imagine that all this would attract legions of concerned environmentalists. But in fact, the green groups are paying less attention now than during the court battles over the waivers. One reason: They can no longer use their primary strategy – "sue the bastards," says one lawyer. "Funding is tight for a lot of groups; you have to pick a niche, and the border is a difficult issue to raise funds around," adds Matt Clark, who worked on the issue for Defenders of Wildlife in Tucson from 2006 to last year. Clark, who's now with the Audubon Society, says that he left Defenders when his job was "reconfigured" to focus on other issues.

And it's not just tight funds and a sense of hopelessness; immigration policy is a complicated issue for environmentalists. A leader of a foundation that funds environmental groups, who would also prefer not to be named, points out that the movement didn't squawk when undocumented immigrants began trashing the desert 10 or 20 years ago. "It ran against the groups' liberal politics in support of immigration," the funder says. Complaining about the impacts of that traffic "would've been politically incorrect."

On the other hand, some environmentalists want the border to be impenetrable, because undocumented immigrants help drive U.S. population growth, and growth in general causes widespread loss of habitat and biodiversity. "The Wilderness Society and other national groups have been quite scared of this issue. Some of their members and donors think national security is the issue here," says Sergio Avila, a pony-tailed Mexican native who's a biologist with Tucson-based Sky Island Alliance, a group that tries to connect habitat across the border. "No one gives us money" to focus on the environmental impacts of border security, Avila says.

Meanwhile, though the pace of constructing walls and fences has slowed, there's relentless pressure on the Border Patrol to make the border secure regardless of impacts. During a 2011 congressional hearing, for instance, two Utah Republicans, Reps. Jason Chaffetz and Rob Bishop, complained that the Border Patrol was still hobbled by environmental concerns. "This is totally unacceptable," Chaffetz said. Legislators in both major parties are pushing bills to expand the waivers to cover all lands at least a hundred miles from the border. The Democratic-controlled Senate passed a bill last year that would spend another $47 billion to hire more than 19,000 additional Border Patrol agents and complete the barriers along 700 miles of the border, among other measures. (That's on top of the $187 billion that's been spent on immigration enforcement since 1986, as estimated by the Migration Policy Institute.)

"With national security, there can never be enough – there's always another hole to patch," says George Nickas, head of Montana-based Wilderness Watch, who toured the Arizona border in 2012.

The environmentalists, desert rats and scientists I talk with want the government to adopt a different strategy – but they don't agree on what it should be. One camp says: Rein in the Border Patrol, welcome immigrants with good records, and help improve the economies of Mexico and Central America to create more jobs there. Some add: Reform U.S. drug policies to legalize marijuana, reducing the incentive for smugglers. "We should attack the root causes, the reasons why people have to move here for jobs," Avila says, "and leave the environment out of it." Another camp says: Just concentrate the Border Patrol's activities within a mile of the border, sacrificing the environment in that limited area, and leave the backcountry alone. "That would be a better trade-off," says former Organ Pipe Cactus Superintendent Baiza, "than having the whole (wilderness) mired in this off-road activity."

Another day, and I'm bumping down and up rough dirt roads in extremely rugged national forest in the Pajarito and Atascosa mountains, four miles from the border, with Avila and Howard Frederick, a Sky Island Alliance board member. Amid oaks and tall grass, we weave between designated and proposed wilderness areas. Everywhere we go, we see Border Patrol vehicles and agents. Their agency has bladed pullouts, side roads, even a campsite. Sky Island maintains four remote cameras in wildlife corridors in this area, and "we see more Border Patrol agents on the wildlife cameras than any other humans," Frederick says. Avila chimes in, "The cameras show how the agents ride their ATVs in the riparian areas."

The wildlife in this national forest includes tropical birds that migrate from Central America, a big colony of Mexican free-tailed bats that roost in a mine tunnel during the summer (as many as 150,000 at a time), and snakes that somehow hang from the tunnel's ceiling to snatch flying bats. A sizable deer population attracts jaguars roaming from Mexico – Avila's passion. A few of these elusive wildcats have been detected just north of the border since 1996, and most of the jaguar photos and paw prints are right in this area. But jaguars are shy, and the security measures are especially hard on them. "The jaguar is telling us where it belongs," says Avila, who speaks with a Mexican accent and sometimes seems to spout poetry. "We should listen to the animals." He adds, "The fear is harming the spirituality of nature that is so important to people."

My last day here is spent on the ground I saw from above on my earlier plane flight. My escort is 75-year-old Fred Goodsell, a leading expert on Border Patrol off-road driving and an old friend of the ornery Southwest writer, Ed Abbey. A classic desert rat, Goodsell wears a sun-reflecting white cotton shirt and white pants, and drives a white four-wheel-drive pickup loaded with jugs of water. Retired from a career managing public land and water around the West, he winters in a small town near the border, and knows this ground probably better than anyone, because he's hiked more than 2,500 miles in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge alone.

For nine hours, Goodsell drives me over the dirt roads through Cabeza Prieta, Organ Pipe Cactus and the adjacent public land. Much of the time we're on the notorious El Camino del Diablo, blazed by Indians long ago. On washboards that rattle our teeth, we pass through one distinctive area after another, defined by stands of huge saguaro and organ pipe cactus, or ocotillo and cholla, or vast creosote flats. Occasionally we stop to walk through the desert, especially where the normally stingy plants are briefly offering their flowers. We see woodpeckers, quail, roadrunners and hawks. Goodsell talks about the Sonoran pronghorn and desert bighorn sheep that he's observed here – one of the main reasons Congress designated more than 90 percent of the refuge and monument as wilderness decades ago.

Other than tire tracks, the only traces of humans all day are two historic shacks (unoccupied), two industrial-looking Border Patrol forward operating bases, one civilian truck – apparently a propane delivery – and lots of Border Patrol vehicles in motion. One stops beside us, so the agent can check us out. The agent says, "You're the first people I've seen in three days" – meaning, the first people not dressed in Border Patrol uniforms.

We see hundreds of tire tracks veering off through the wilderness and other backcountry, and many side roads carved by repeated driving. Border Patrol vehicles have also cut arcs outward from both sides of the authorized roads by turning around without backing up (in apparent violation of the promise made in the 2013 "intergovernmental" meeting in Tucson, which Goodsell also attended). They've carved ruts wallowing through sand and mud, driven all over looking for a way across washes and sandy playas that were temporarily flooded. We find places where they've gotten stuck, spun tires and wedged branches under their tires, and so on.

It's difficult to tell whether the agents are driving on tracks blazed years ago by border-crossers, or following tracks started years ago by other agents, or making new tracks as they go. Some of the off-road tracks are definitely fresh. Goodsell says the aerial surveys detect only a fraction of the off-road and renegade driving in the wilderness areas; he estimates the actual total is more like 25,000 miles. "There's no other vehicles out here, other than the Border Patrol," Goodsell says. "They're just hammering this place!"

We kneel down to appreciate some of the best desert soil: The so-called "desert pavement," where the wind has blown away all the fine grains, leaving many tiny stones that form a shallow crust, and the "cryptobiotic" soil, where cultures of hardy fungus and algae grow in little grayish-black clumps, retaining enough moisture from dew and occasional rains to hold things together. We find places where the tire tracks cross these soils too, doing very long-term damage.

It's a melancholy tour, and at dusk, we shake hands and I begin driving back to Tucson on the two-lane asphalt. I spend additional hours crossing the Tohono O'odham Reservation, where the tribal radio station plays reggae tunes that mostly originated in Jamaica – the kind of global border crossing no security measures can stop. I'm about the only person on the road, and the feeling is familiar. Above the windshield, bright stars compete with a half moon.

The speed limit varies from 55 to 65, as the road curves and dips through washes. I average about 5 mph over the limit, the margin allowed citizen drivers. Every so often, headlights approach from behind and tailgate me, lighting up the interior of my car, and then zoom past: one Border Patrol SUV after another. They don't appear to be responding to an emergency, just heading back to their bigger bases near Tucson for a shift change. The agents are driving at least 10 mph over the limit, and they know they can get away with it.

Ray Ring, an HCN senior editor based in Montana, knows the desert from the 15 years he lived in Tucson.

This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsArizonaImmigrationCommunitiesPoliticsU.S. - Mexican BorderFeatures2014/06/16 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleRemembering Cecil Garlandhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.10/remembering-cecil-garland
The passing of a wilderness advocate, and an HCN correspondent moves to North Dakota.Forty-nine years ago, a Lincoln, Montana, hardware-store owner spread maps of the nearby national forest on his kitchen table. A self-educated migrant from North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains, he liked to hunt elk in a backcountry area where the Forest Service wanted to build roads, logging areas and campsites. He drew a line around the land he wanted to protect; later, he recalled: "I set out a jar of whiskey from the Smokies. The further we got into that bottle, the easier it was to draw the boundaries."

That moonshine-fueled mapper, Cecil Garland, died on May 11 at age 88, leaving his mark on the West. His grassroots campaign persuaded Congress to designate the 239,936-acre Scapegoat Wilderness Area in 1972 – the first wilderness protected by ordinary citizens instead of the Forest Service. (One agency boss complained: "We have lost control.") In 1973, Garland moved to a small cattle ranch in the Utah desert, where he helped lead the successful opposition to the Air Force's plan to install MX missile sites around the Great Basin. Recently, he battled Las Vegas' scheme to import groundwater from his area.

HCN began covering Garland in 1972, and in 1986, he wrote a cover story headlined "In defense of running cows on the public's land," available in our online archives. He was no saint and sometimes made offensive remarks. But as Montana Wilderness Association staffer John Gatchell says: "Many times, as I meet wilderness activists around the West, they tell me that they were inspired by him." A celebration of Garland's life will be held in Callao, Utah, on the weekend of Sept. 6. His family suggests honoring him by donating to MWA or the Great Basin Water Network.

Emily goes NorthEmily Guerin, a former HCN intern and editorial fellow, is moving on. For the past year she's been a correspondent for HCN, living in our hometown of Paonia, Colorado. Now she's headed off to report on North Dakota's dramatic energy boom for Inside Energy, a new public radio and television collaboration. Based at Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver, it covers the energy industry in Wyoming, Colorado and North Dakota.

Two people overheard her talking about mixed-grass prairie in a Bismarck restaurant while she was in town for the job interview. Randy and Karen Kreil, wildlife biologists, wondered how she knew what a mixed-grass prairie was. Turns out the couple are longtime HCN readers who have already begun to suggest story ideas to Emily.

A dandy new book from Katie LeeIndomitable canyon-country defender Katie Lee, now 94, has a new book out. The Ghosts of Dandy Crossing (Dream Garden Press) is a collection of lively stories about a Colorado River ford that was drowned by Lake Powell. Katie's tales, juicy and crackling with life, concern a love affair and the various fascinating characters who once lived in the area. Southwestern writer and HCN contributor Craig Childs writes: "(Katie Lee) is our foul-mouthed, lightning-eyed, boot-stomping balladeer, a character Louis L'Amour never could have invented."

]]>No publisherDear Friends2014/06/09 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleNative American tourism quietly thriveshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.6/native-american-tourism-quietly-thrives
Can tourists benefit, not just exploit, tribal communities?If you're looking for a travel experience inspired by Native American culture, you might try the Lodgepole Gallery & Tipi Village outside Browning, Mont., where for $60 a night you can rent a Blackfeet-style tipi with a view of prairie and peaks. Firewood and wireless Internet are included; another $15 rents a sleeping bag and pad.

For an additional charge, you can enjoy a traditional Blackfeet dinner that features buffalo, deer or elk meat, campfire entertainment including ceremonial songs and drumming, or a "Blackfeet traditional art workshop." And for $195, a Blackfeet guide will take you on an all-day horseback ride, exploring historical and cultural sites on the reservation.

"I've been doing this for 20 years, and there's nothing else like it in the whole United States," says Darrell Norman, one of the Lodgepole's managers and a Blackfeet tribal member. "I'm probably the only one crazy enough to do it."

That's Norman's way of saying that his Native business is more authentic than others. But it's difficult to evaluate the claim, because there are many others and they can be surprisingly hard to discover, as if they're half-hidden by clouds.

At the Gaynor Ranch and Resort near Whitefish, Mont. – run by Nancy Gaynor, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and her husband – you can rent tipis or cabins, hire a tribal member to guide you on a trail ride, and participate in traditional tribal songs near a medicine wheel. The Gaynors' tipis feature buffalo-hide rugs on wooden floors and nice beds with down comforters – "we call it 'tipi glamping,' " Nancy Gaynor says, using the slang for glamorous camping. Tourists from England, Italy, Poland, Israel, Russia and the Philippines keep her place busy, but when asked, "How do they discover you?" she answers, "I don't know."

GoNativeAmerica.com, aka NDN2rs (for "Indian tours"), sells Native-guided tours on reservations ranging from Canada to Arizona, and attracts international customers without much advertising. "They just find us on the Web, or by word of mouth," says Sarah Mathuin at NDN2rs, which recently moved its headquarters from Billings, Mont., to Jackson, Wyo.

There is no centralized listing of Native tourism operations in the West, according to many sources. Even the leading trade group – the American Indian Alaska Native Travel Association, based in Albuquerque, N.M. – doesn't have a complete list. "The Western American Indian Chamber was the only organization that was attempting to build a comprehensive database of Native American tourism attractions. That effort faltered years ago ... and the Western American Indian Chamber no longer exists," says Ben Sherman, an Oglala Lakota Sioux who was president of the Chamber.

It's ironic, because tourists are increasingly interested in Native American culture, and they can create revenue and jobs on reservations that are short of both. That's why many tribal governments have tourism offices that try to promote local operations, but there are complications with even those efforts. Tribes tend to "start small-scale and build long-term – it takes vision," says Gordon Bronitsky, a Native tourism consultant based in Albuquerque. Natives are often reluctant to exploit their culture for profit, and there's "a tension between tribal members who are tourism entrepreneurs and the tribal government wanting to regulate it without offering dollars to support it," Bronitsky adds.

"We never engage tribal governments, if we can help it," says one manager of a Westwide Native tourism operation, who asked to remain anonymous. "Tribal governments usually change every two years, and the new governments clear out all the deals made by the previous governments. And if a tribal government finds out what we're doing on a reservation, the government usually wants a percentage without passing the money along to needy tribal members. We'd rather work directly with traditional Natives – like tribal elders and artists, who are rarely in governments. For us, it's about putting money directly into the tribal communities."

On top of the difficulty of finding a Native operation, there's a fundamental uncertainty involved: Which enterprises offer a genuine Native experience, and which are superficial, just capitalizing on a trend? "Our customers want to understand Native America rather than the made-up culture," says Mathuin. "Many other companies just offer a drive-by experience, keeping most of the money for the company." Gaynor and Norman also make a point of describing their operations as authentic. Probably the best idea is to check customer reviews on websites like TripAdvisor.com, where Norman's Lodgepole operation gets 14 "excellent" ratings and one "terrible" one, for instance. Assuming, of course, you can even find a review.